


Pages Upon Pages

by verdant_fire



Category: Vampire Diaries (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, College, F/M, Ficlet, Human Elena, Writers, Writing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-29
Updated: 2013-04-29
Packaged: 2017-12-09 21:31:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 268
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/778193
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/verdant_fire/pseuds/verdant_fire
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He'll burn the words like incense on an altar.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pages Upon Pages

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted on LJ in December 2011, to the D/E prompt _I'm only here to witness the remains of loving you._ Title from "[The Engine Driver](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HG1FlsgLQQY)" by the Decemberists.

After Elena leaves for college, Damon starts writing again. Not journals or novels, this time; letters, and only when he’s drunk. Letters are sacred texts that he hasn’t written since he was alive, since he was human. These particular scriptures say _you’re not the worst company in the world_ and _I love you_ and _sometimes I do things I don’t have to do_. He throws them into the fire along with his bourbon. He’ll burn the words like incense on an altar, just another offering to the god of cowardice.

Love, like religion, always ends with an apocalypse.

//

After Elena leaves for college, she starts writing again. She goes to a normal school and chooses a normal major but minors in creative writing because it’s what she wanted to do once, back before her life became too fantastic to believe. She likes her classes, gets good grades and tries not to think about how all her compositions involve codependent brothers or destructive women. Mostly it’s fine— _I’m fine_ —except for the aftershocks, the tremors of memory. She freezes whenever she sees the drape of a leather jacket over strong shoulders, and once at a party she comes dangerously close to going home with a dark-haired boy who has a smile like a clenched fist. She goes back to her dorm instead, stares at her bookshelf, at the Ellis Bell copy of _Wuthering Heights_ that Stefan gave her and Damon’s first edition of _Brideshead Revisited_ that she borrowed and never gave back. She wonders if she’s like Julia.

She wonders what happens to the stories that never get told.


End file.
